Chapter Twenty
The Cameras Were Rolling

In early January 2010, two black Audi A-6 cars sailed through the fortified gate of a gray building perched on a hill in North Tel Aviv. The building, called “the College,” was actually Mossad headquarters. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was welcomed by the ramsad, Meir Dagan, when he came out of the second car. A short while earlier, Netanyahu had extended Dagan’s appointment by another year.

Dagan and the Mossad heads felt upbeat and confident after the success of their last operations: the destruction of the Syrian reactor, the killings of Mughniyeh and Suleiman. What was urgent now was to sever another link between Iran and the terrorists, and that link had a name: Al-Mabhouh. According to the journalist Ronen Bergman, the Mossad code name for getting Al-Mabhouh was “Plasma Screen.”

In the briefing room, Dagan and his senior aides presented their plan for the killing of Mahmoud Abdel Rauf Al-Mabhouh, a leader of Hamas and the linchpin in the system of smuggling weapons from Iran via Sudan, Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula into the Gaza strip. Al-Mabhouh, Dagan’s men said, would be killed in Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf.

Netanyahu approved the execution of Plasma Screen, and the preparations started right away. The plan was to kill Al-Mabhouh in a hotel room in Dubai. The London Sunday Times reported that the members of the Mossad hit team rehearsed the killing in a Tel Aviv hotel without notifying hotel management.

Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, a.k.a. “Abu Abed,” was born in 1960 in the Jabalia refugee camp, in the north of the Gaza strip. In the late seventies, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and, as a fervent Muslim, took part in sabotaging Arab cafés where gambling was practiced. In 1986, he was arrested by the Israeli Army for possession of an AK-47 assault rifle, but was released after less than a year and joined the Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigade, the military arm of Hamas.

Al-Mabhouh’s commander, Salah Shehadeh, tasked him and several other Hamas terrorists with a special mission: kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers. On February 16, 1989, Al-Mabhouh and another Hamas member stole a car, dressed as ultra-Orthodox Jews, and offered a lift to a soldier, Avi Sasportas, who was standing at a crossroads, trying to hitch a ride home. As Sasportas entered their car, Al-Mabhouh turned back and shot him in the face. The soldier was buried by Al-Mabhouh and his acolytes, after they photographed themselves with the body. Three months after murdering Sasportas, Al-Mabhouh and other Hamas members abducted another soldier, Ilan Saadon, at the Re’em crossroads and murdered him as well. Later, in an Al-Jazeera interview, Al-Mabhouh admitted his part in the assassinations and in burying the dead soldiers.

After the second murder, Al-Mabhouh escaped to Egypt, then to Jordan, and continued his terrorist activities, mostly by smuggling weapons and explosives into Gaza. Back in Cairo, he was arrested by the Egyptians, spent most of 2003 in an Egyptian jail, and later escaped to Syria. He now was labeled a dangerous terrorist, wanted by the police of Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. He was regarded by his superiors as a gifted organizer and climbed the Hamas hierarchy, focusing most of his efforts in smuggling weapons from Iran to the Gaza strip.

Al-Mabhouh realized that he was wanted by the Mossad because of his functions; he also knew that Israel would not forgive and forget the murder of its two soldiers. He took strict precautions, changed identities often, and posed as a businessman traveling between Middle East cities for his legitimate dealings. He told a friend that, when staying in a hotel, he used to barricade his room door with armchairs “to prevent bad surprises.”

In a rare interview he gave to the Al-Jazeera network, Al-Mabhouh appeared with his head covered with a black cloth. “They tried to hit me three times,” he said, “and they almost succeeded. Once in Dubai, once in Lebanon—six months ago—and a third time in Syria, two months ago, after the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh. That’s the price to be paid by all those who fight the Israelis.”

Al-Mabhouh actually gave the interview against his will; he thought it was an unnecessary risk but had to obey the explicit orders of the Hamas leadership. Some were to assert later that the interview helped the Mossad to find him. Al-Mabhouh had agreed to appear in front of the cameras on one condition: that his face would be completely blurred. After the recording of the interview, the videotape was sent to Gaza for inspection. It turned out that the distorting of his face failed, and he was instructed to record the interview again. The broadcast of the new interview was postponed (it would be aired only after Al-Mabhouh’s death). Al-Mabhouh asked what happened to the first recording, and was told that the videotape was kept in the Hamas archives. Some believe that this tape made its way into the hands of the agents who were trying to find him.

A few weeks after the recording, a senior member of Hamas got a phone call from an Arab who claimed to be connected with a group that specialized in arms-smuggling and money-laundering. He made weapons-hungry Hamas some offers they could not refuse, and asked to meet Al-Mabhouh in Dubai. It was strange that he had chosen Dubai as a meeting place; the bustling city was actually the place where Al-Mabhouh was meeting his Iranian counterparts. Perhaps this mysterious phone call was Al-Mabhouh’s death sentence.

 

And then, an unprecedented episode in the history of the spook wars: the elimination of Plasma Screen was filmed, recorded, and immortalized by closed-circuit security cameras, installed all over Dubai, from the airport counters all the way down to the hotel lobbies, hallways, and elevators.

These tapes are a unique document of the unfolding of the operation and its subsequent stages: they allowed hundreds of millions of spectators throughout the world, comfortably sprawled in their armchairs, to follow a secret, deadly operation of a hit team.

 

Monday, January 18, 2010.

Several Mossad agents land in Dubai. They are the precursors of a large team of twenty-seven agents that would trickle into Dubai in the next twenty-four hours. Twelve of them would carry British passports, four French, four Australian, one German, and six Irish.

The agents check into different hotels in the city.

 

Tuesday, January 19, 2010.

12:09 A.M.—two Mossad agents, balding, forty-three-year-old Michael Bodenheimer, carrying a German passport, and his friend James Leonard, carrying a British passport, land in Dubai. The two of them, according to the local police, are the advance team of the group charged with killing Al-Mabhouh.

12:30 A.M.—the operation commander, Kevin Daveron, sporting a goatee and spectacles, arrives in Dubai aboard a direct flight from Paris. He is accompanied by his deputy, Gail Folliard, a vivacious redhead. Both are carrying Irish passports.

01:21 A.M.—Gail Folliard checks into the exclusive hotel Jumeriah and gets a room on the eleventh floor. When asked by the reception clerk for her home address, she answers without batting an eye: 78 Memmier Road, Dublin, Ireland. It would later be established that this address was nonexistent.

01:31 A.M.—Kevin Daveron, the commander, joins his deputy and checks into the Jumeriah. He gets room 3308.

02:29 A.M.—Peter Elvinger, the operation logistics coordinator, arrives in Dubai with a French passport. He is slim, bearded, wearing stylish glasses. According to the police, he carries a “suspicious” case.

02:36 A.M.—at the airport, Peter meets another member of the team and they leave together for a hotel in the city.

10:15 A.M.—Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh departs from Damascus to Dubai, on a direct Emirates airline flight. In Dubai, he is supposed to coordinate with an Iranian envoy the smuggling of another weapons shipment to Gaza.

10:30 A.M.—Peter, the operation coordinator, leaves the hotel and meets the hit team at a big shopping center.

10:50 A.M.—Kevin and Gail, the commander and his deputy, join the meeting at the shopping center. Kevin is not wearing his glasses, and his small mustache has vanished.

12:18 P.M.—the meeting is over, and the team disperses. Kevin returns to the Jumeriah Hotel and checks out. The security cameras show him entering another hotel, where he puts on a wig, eyeglasses, and a false mustache.

02:12 P.M.—two agents dressed in tennis outfits enter the luxurious Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel. They are watchers, waiting for Al-Mabhouh, who is supposed to arrive in the next hour.

03:12 P.M.—Gail also leaves the Jumeriah Hotel. For the night spent in the hotel, she pays the sum of $400.

03:15 P.M.—Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh lands in Dubai. At the immigration booth, he shows a false Iraqi passport and declares he is in the textile import business.

03:25 P.M.—Gail moves to another hotel, where she changes clothes, makes up her face, and puts on a wig.

03:28 P.M.—Al-Mabhouh arrives at the Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel. At check-in, he asks for a room with sealed windows and no terrace. He is given room 230 on the second floor. He takes the elevator to the second floor, unaware of the two Mossad watchers dressed as tennis players, who ride the elevator with him.

03:30 P.M.—the watchers report, by a special transmission device, that Al-Mabhouh has entered his room and the room facing his has the number 237.

03:53 P.M.—Peter, the coordinator, arrives in Al-Mabhouh’s hotel and walks into the business center. He calls reception and reserves room 237.

04:03 P.M.—a new watchers team relieves the first and waits for Al-Mabhouh to leave his room.

04:14 P.M.—all the members of the hit team are now in the Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel.

04:23 P.M.—Al-Mabhouh leaves his room, surveys the lobby to make sure that the place is “clean,” and leaves the hotel. The watchers follow him.

04:24 P.M.—the watchers transmit to the team commander details about the car that has taken Al-Mabhouh downtown.

04:27 P.M.—Peter, the coordinator, enters the lobby and gives Kevin Daveron his case, which probably contains the objects needed for Al-Mabhouh’s assassination.

04:33 P.M.—Peter goes to the reception desk, checks in, and receives the key for room 237, facing Al-Mabhouh’s room.

04:40 P.M.—Peter gives the room key to Kevin, and leaves the hotel for an unknown destination.

04:44 P.M.—Kevin enters room 237. He checks the window and the door peephole, by which he would be able to watch Al-Mabhouh enter his room.

05:06 P.M.—Gail goes into room 237. She and Kevin go over the timetables and keep receiving reports about Al-Mabhouh’s moves in the city.

05:36 P.M.—one of the watchers enters the hotel wearing a visor cap. At a corner of an empty hallway, he replaces the cap with a wig.

06:21 P.M.—Gail leaves room 237, carrying the case previously delivered to Kevin by Peter. She goes to the hotel parking lot and gives the case to one of the hit team members.

06:32 P.M.—the first detail of the hit team leaves the parking lot and enters the hotel lobby.

06:34 P.M.—the second detail of the hit team enters the hotel and settles on the armchairs and sofas in the far corner of the luxurious lobby, as far as possible from the first detail.

06:43 P.M.—the first watchers detail, the agents wearing tennis clothes, leaves the hotel.

07:30 P.M.—Peter, the logistics coordinator, leaves Dubai on a flight to Munich, Germany.

08:00 P.M.—a hotel employee who cleaned the second floor leaves the place. The hit team detail tries to enter Al-Mabhouh’s room.

08:04 P.M.—Kevin, who is posted by the elevators, signals to the members of the hit team to get into the room, because an elevator stops at the second floor and a hotel guest gets out of it. The electronic control system registers an attempt to break into room 230, the room of Al-Mabhouh.

08:20 P.M.—Al-Mabhouh returns to the hotel. The watchers inform Kevin that he is walking toward the elevator.

08:27 P.M.—Al-Mabhouh enters his room. Kevin and Gail are on guard at the second-floor corridor, by the elevators. In room 230, the assassination takes place.

08:46 P.M.—four members of the hit team leave the hotel.

08:47 P.M.—Gail and another member of the hit team leave the hotel.

08:51 P.M.—Kevin enters Al-Mabhouh’s room after the killing and places the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle.

08:52 P.M.—the watchers detail leaves the hotel.

10:30 P.M.—Kevin and Gail leave Dubai on a direct flight to Paris. Approximately at the same time, all the team members depart to different destinations.

 

At 10:00 P.M., Al-Mabhouh’s wife called his cell phone. The phone rang and went to voice mail. She called over and over again but with no results. A close friend also tried to reach Al-Mabhouh, but failed. Text messages sent to Al-Mabhouh remained unanswered. Time passed by and there was no sign of life from Al-Mabhouh. The distraught wife called several Hamas senior officials, who decided to send the Hamas resident in Dubai to the Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel. The man went to the reception desk and called room 230; there was no answer.

After midnight, the hotel employees finally went up to Al-Mabhouh’s room, unlocked the door, and found his body. A doctor rushed to the room examined the corpse and concluded that the cause of death was cardiac arrest.

 

The Hamas published an official statement attributing Al-Mabhouh’s death to “medical reasons.” But Al-Mabhouh’s family rejected the medical diagnosis and insisted that Al-Mabhouh had been murdered by the Mossad. His body was sent to the Dubai medical examiner, while a sample of his blood was flown to a laboratory in France. The lab report came back nine days later. The Hamas now announced that Mossad agents had assassinated Al-Mabhouh, first stunning him with an electronic shocker and then suffocating him with a pillow. Simultaneously, the Dubai police announced that no traces of poison were found in Al-Mabhouh’s blood. Nevertheless, they quickly reached the conclusion that the Mossad had killed Al-Mabhouh on their territory. On January 31, twelve days after Al-Mabhouh’s death, the London Sunday Times published a piece about his poisoning by the Mossad. Its reporters claim that Israeli hit men had entered Al-Mabhouh’s room and injected him with a poison that simulated a heart attack; the agents then photographed all the documents he carried and exited the room, leaving behind the DO NOT DISTURB sign.

On February 28, the deputy chief of the Dubai police informed the press that the French lab had found in Al-Mabhouh’s blood traces of a strong hydrochloride painkiller, used for anesthesia before surgery. This substance, he said, causes a muscular relaxation followed by a loss of consciousness. He assumed that the killers injected their victim with the anesthetic and then suffocated him so that his death would look natural.

The journalist Gordon Thomas published an article in the London Telegraph about “the Mossad’s license to kill.” Thomas asserted that the modus operandi in Al-Mabhouh’s death was similar to other assassinations carried out by the Mossad in the past. He added that the eleven members of the hit team, six of them women, had been chosen out of forty-eight members of the Kidon operational unit. Yossi Melman of Haaretz daily also stressed that the killers’ moves, as reflected by the security cameras and other findings, were identical to past Mossad operations: arrival by separate flights from different parts of the world, stays in different hotels, phone calls placed through international operators, clothes that make identification difficult, and an effort to pose as genuine tourists or businessmen trying to mix business with pleasure. But other experts dismissed that theory, saying that these were exactly the methods used by most Western secret services, therefore it was impossible to establish clearly who had carried out the assassination.

The German weekly Der Spiegel revealed that the German intelligence agency, the BND, had informed the members of the German parliament that Al-Mabhouh had been killed by Mossad agents. Der Spiegel also described how Michael Bodenheimer, born in Israel, had applied in 2009 for a German passport because his parents had been born in Germany. With his new passport, he had flown, on November 8, 2009, from Frankfurt to Dubai and then to Hong Kong, an itinerary identical to his flights before and after the assassination. According to Der Spiegel, nine other agents had flown to Dubai on the same day in November 2009 from different airports in Europe. That seemed to be a dress rehearsal for the real operation carried out in January 2010.

In an interview with the Al-Arabiya newspaper, the chief of the Dubai police, Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, explained why he was certain that the Mossad had killed Al-Mabhouh: “First, we have some DNA samples and fingerprints. Second, all of [the hit team members] carried genuine foreign passports whose details were false, and when it turned out that some of the owners [of the passports] were from Israel—so what do you think, that ‘Peace Now’ murdered Al-Mabhouh? . . . It is the Mossad, one hundred percent!”

The chief of the Dubai police soon became a media star, spending hours in front of the world televisions, giving interviews to anyone who was ready to listen. He became the favorite of the television reporters, mostly thanks to Dubai’s security cameras. He showed to the press a video film, actually assembled from the tapes of security cameras spread all over Dubai. Tamim cleverly explained and showed how the hit team members moved throughout the emirate, and how they entered and exited hotels, shopping centers, and the airport, in their effort to shadow Al-Mabhouh, often changing clothes and disguises.

According to Tamim, the core of the hit team was composed of eleven members: three Irish citizens, six Britons, one Frenchman, and one German. They arrived in Dubai aboard several flights from various European airports, some of them the night before the operations, others at the same time as Al-Mabhouh, and a few of them a mere couple of hours before the operation. Six hundred forty-eight hours of tape from the security cameras helped the Dubai police to reconstruct the events culminating with Al-Mabhouh’s death.

The tapes and the photos taken by immigration authorities of all the passengers entering and exiting Dubai drove the Dubai police chief to the conclusion that not eleven but more than a score of Mossad agents participated in the operation. The official number he mentioned was twenty-seven, but Tamim later added a few more names to his list of suspects.

Yet his conclusions raised several questions: Didn’t the Mossad know that a network of security cameras was spread all over Dubai? According to Tamim, Israeli agents had visited Dubai several times, to prepare the operation. Didn’t they see the security cameras? And if they did, then perhaps a large part of the getting in and out of hotels, the change of clothes, wigs, and mustaches were nothing but a show for the cameras; and quite a few of the participants were not a part of the operation but were used only to mislead those who would examine the tapes later.

And another point: the chief of police boasted that all the members of the hit team were photographed as they went through immigration. Didn’t the Mossad know that was the procedure in Dubai? Didn’t it make sure that the faces of its agents would be made up and disguised so that it would be impossible to recognize them afterward?

A third question: How come the security cameras recorded every frame and every second of the secret agents’ moves, except for two—the entering and exiting of the hit detail in and out of Al-Mabhouh’s room?

Chief Tamim revealed to the press that the members of the hit team used a phone number in Austria for some of their communications; by checking telephone records, Tamim could establish the identities of the foreigners who had used that number and were, apparently, members of the Mossad team. He also pointed out that several of the agents had paid their expenses in Dubai with Payoneer—MasterCard rechargeable credit cards, an Iowa-based company that had a research and development center in Israel.

The most intriguing revelation in the investigation was that most of the hit team members had used real passports of Israeli citizens with dual nationality—and only very few used forged passports. Apparently, this was for a reason—the hit team was operating in an Arab country that is considered enemy territory. If the hit team members were captured, they could ask for the protection of the consuls of Great Britain, Germany, France, and Australia . . . If the consuls checked their computers, they would have found out that these people really existed, and they would have agreed to assist them. If, on the contrary, the hit team had used forged passports, the deception would have been exposed right away, and the agents would have been left without protection.

 

After all this became known, Israel was harshly criticized by the nations whose passports had been used in Dubai. Great Britain, Australia, and Ireland expelled the Mossad representatives from their soil. Poland arrested a man called Uri Brodsky at Warsaw’s airport and extradited him to Germany. Brodsky was suspected of helping the agent Michael Bodenheimer to obtain a German passport under false pretenses. (Brodsky was finally released by Germany after paying a fine of 60,000 euros. Bodenheimer was not found.) Other countries expressed their indignation and fury. These reactions seemed laced with hypocrisy, as the use of forged or doctored passports is the standard rule of secret service activity; the nations now accusing Israel were and are using forged passports exactly the same way as the Mossad. Yet when a Russian spy network was uncovered in the United States in late 2010, nobody accused its members of using forged British and American papers.

The reports in the world press created the impression that the Dubai operation was successful but had suffered from a grave mistake, the result of Israel’s gross underestimation of Dubai and the Western nations they involved. That was a blow to Israel’s international image, but not to its secret activity. The expelled Mossad envoys were soon replaced by others. The promises of the Dubai chief of police that the hit team members would be apprehended, because their identities were known all over the world, went unanswered. Not one Mossad agent of the Dubai team was identified by any police and arrested.

Yet Dubai became a symbol of the new challenges facing any secret service in a changing world. The cloak-and-dagger era is definitely over. Security cameras, photographs and thumbprints at immigration, rapid checks of passports, DNA . . . all those require much more sophisticated means and methods from the spooks of this world when they set off on their dark, sinister missions.

 

On April 7, 2011, an unidentified aircraft fired a missile on a passenger car, on a road fifteen kilometers south of Port Sudan, in the African state of Sudan. According to Israeli sources, the car was attacked by a Shoval drone that can fly four thousand kilometers without refueling and carry a load of a ton. The Shoval is of a new generation of drones that Israel now uses in risky over-the-border missions, replacing aircraft piloted by men. The Israeli drones, some of the best in the world, carry out intelligence and attack missions all over the Middle East.

One of the two people killed in the car attack in Sudan was said to be a Hamas leader. The Hamas used the Sudan trail for smuggling weapons from Iran to Gaza. The weapons came by boat, were unloaded in Port Sudan, and proceeded in a convoy of vehicles via Egypt and the Sinai to Gaza, their drivers bribing their way through borders and check posts.

The Sudanese government immediately accused Israel of the coup.

Israel had been designated as the culprit for another mysterious attack on a weapons convoy in January 2009; the trucks carrying weapons, missiles, and explosives had been destroyed, and forty people manning the convoy had been killed.

One of the men allegedly killed was the Hamas leader in charge of smuggling weapons from Iran to Gaza.